With the rise of terrestrial satellite technology, there are now available a number of digital satellite radio services which beam hundreds of channels of programming to subscribers in automobiles, boats, and other land-based locations. Consumers enjoy the signal clarity of such multichannel broadcast systems, as well as the convenience of not having to listen to commercials, as these services are generally based on a commercial-free and subscriber fee business model. Although there are a large variety of programming channels available, subscribers tend to listen to at most a few channels, and generally, one channel most of the time. Nonetheless, since there is some content crossover between channels, as well as the fact that many users have multiple interests across a wide-ranging variety of musical and other channel content genres, it is quite likely that while a particular consumer is listening to one channel, the content of other channels may be of interest to him or her.
Additionally, in the world of television, media consumers have become accustomed to viewing one program in a main viewing window and simultaneously having available a text based datastream continuously running across the bottom of the screen. This is seen, for example, in major media news and sports broadcasts such as the Fox News Channel, the Bloomberg channel or ESPN. The analogous feature for satellite radio is the ability to listen to one channel while having auxiliary information, such as sports scores, last stock prices, weather alerts, etc. simultaneously available on a receiver display.
Conventionally, one way to most efficiently find programming of interest to a particular listener would be to either obtain detailed programming schedules in advance and change channels to always listen to particular channels, or to simply continually scan through the various channels as is done with television remote control devices, and keep switching until a song, artist, news or sports channel of interest is located.
Given the fact that multichannel broadcast systems, such as, for example, digital satellite radio services, can process, distribute and format the bit streams they broadcast in numerous ways, they have opportunities to provide, along with particular audio bit streams, textual and other non-audio data which may be of interest to a user.
One example for which this capability has been utilized is textual description of the audio clips being played. In such implementations, textual data can be embedded within the audio bit stream of each one of the broadcast audio channels. Such textual data is often referred to as Program Descriptive Text, or “PDT.” PDT can be utilized to display information to a user which is descriptive of the audio content he or she is currently listening to. Such data can include, for example, the song name, the recording artist, the composer and other associated information. Alternatively, PDT data can be sent in a separate bitstream from the audio data in an associated service channel.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/900,935, under common assignment herewith, contains a detailed description of how a receiver can search through transmitted PDT for all of the channels in a multichannel broadcasting system, whether by analyzing service channel PDT or PDT embedded within each audio channel, and determine whether any of the PDT data matches any audio selections on a user defined playlist. If such a match is found, a receiver can, based on relative user defined rankings of the audio clip currently being listened to and the newly matched audio clip, automatically tune to the channel where the matched audio selection is being played. The disclosure of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/900,935 is hereby fully incorporated herein by this reference.
In addition to the utility of such a feature, there are other possible choices besides using PDT to locate matches to a playlist and then either change stations or not change stations based on user defined rules. The ability of multichannel digital broadcast systems to simultaneously transmit audio as well as textual and other data can also be utilized to provide users with a variety of other desirable services. For example, listeners may wish to continue to listen to a particular channel without being switched to a given sports game of interest to them. Nonetheless, they may desire to be alerted whenever the score changes, or at least when a significant score change occurs. Or, for example, a user may wish to keep an eye on the stock market indices, or a certain number of stocks in particular, while enjoying other audio programming. Or, for example, while driving to a destination where various possible routes exist they may desire to be alerted when a traffic report is available and then, once having heard the report, be able to conveniently return to the prior channel.
Thus it would be desirable to have in the art a system and method which can efficiently provide users of multichannel broadcast systems with alternative ways to select audio content of interest on a particular channel not currently being played, as well as to provide auxiliary data streams for display in conjunction with related and unrelated audio programming.